Announcing oohEmbed!

01 Jun 2008 · #techtalk

In my last post here, I mentioned some items on my ever growing TODO list and on top of that list was: Finish the web app that I’ve started working on.

Well, it’s time to scratch that one off the list since oohEmbed.com is now live!

A bit of background before I get to what is oohEmbed. As you know, I’ve been working on and off on Dumble for the past several months. Now Dumble is a purely browser based application with antrix.net serving up just a bunch of static files. Because of this non-involvement of server-side programming and the web browser’s same origin policy restrictions, there’s a limit to how much smart URL-content-inferring can be achieved in Dumble. With the current design, Dumble can go only as far as the number of websites out there that support JSON APIs.

So on one side, I was toying around with adding a server-side component to Dumble’s design to alleviate this problem. On the other, I was looking to kick the tires around Google App Engine. In between the two, the oEmbed specification was announced and thus was born oohEmbed.

So what exactly is oohEmbed? In the simplest terms, oohEmbed acts like a oEmbed API compatible proxy service between you (the developer) and target websites. For more details, visit the oohEmbed.com web site where I’ve described it a bit more with some examples.

Of course, I’ve re-written parts of Dumble to use this new oohEmbed service. You can find the forked version at oohembed.com/dumble/. If things go well, I’ll designate this as the authoritative version and switch/redirect the version at antrix.net/dumble/ to it.

Thanks to the folks behind oEmbed for drafting the spec and to Google for creating App Engine. Although the App Engine environment is restrictive development wise, there’s something to be said for a stack which allows one command - appcfg.py update myapp/ - deployments to the cloud! And it’s all Python so I couldn’t be any happier!

Please test out oohEmbed and let me know what you think. If you really want to please me, go build something on top of it!